Re: Confused about cadence testing cycles

Information in these quotes is all that I know about this subject. It might clear things up a bit.

ISOs

Iso's will now be automatically 'smoke' tested before general release. No more completely broken installers on the published images! In addition, the iso's will be published daily as usual, but will not have typical milestones as mentioned above. Preference will be given to the daily iso -- the current one -- throughout the cycle. Testing will occur in a cadence instead of a milestone.

Cadence

Rather than milestones, a bi-weekly cadence of testing will occur with the goal of assuring good quality throughout the release cycle. The cadence weeks will be scheduled and feature testing different pieces of ubuntu in a more focused manner. This includes things like unity, the installer, and new features landing in ubuntu, but will also be the target of feedback from the state of ubuntu quality.

State of ubuntu Quality

A bold effort to generate a high level view of what needs testing and what is working well on a per image basis inside of ubuntu. This is an experimental idea whose implementation will garner feedback early in the cycle and will collect data and influence decisions for testing focus during the cycle. *fingers crossed*

Every 2 weeks as part of our testing cadence,, we download copies of the latest daily ISO images, burn them to CDs (or load them into VM's) and test them. This brings to light many issues that might have been missed by other early adopters and developers, especially in the CD builds and installers.

As I understand things, and I am most likely wrong, we can test each image of each day of the week, starting from the Saturday. Or, we can test the image for just one day. I am hoping (no, I am expecting) that we can report our results any time during that week.

Up until now results for the testing of one daily image had to be posted before that image was superseded. Each daily image was superseded by another image every 24 hours. I do not think that this will apply during Cadence week although there will be new images every day.

Regards.

P.S. The testing that we are doing now keeps some of us from becoming brain dead. It certainly does that for me.

Last edited by grahammechanical; November 20th, 2012 at 10:22 PM.

It is a machine. It is more stupid than we are. It will not stop us from doing stupid things.Ubuntu user #33,200. Linux user #530,530

Re: Confused about cadence testing cycles

Originally Posted by grahammechanical

P.S. The testing that we are doing now keeps some of us from becoming brain dead. It certainly does that for me.

Very well put but I am still curious as to how our input here in U+1 forums is of any help , especially if the devs are not visiting these forums. I mean , yes , we help each other as a community however small or large but does our input have any influence on developers at large? Do we have any real influence on Canonical as a whole? And I wonder at times if there are commercial reasons for cadence testing? I know Canonical has to make money to support itself, pay it's employees and turn a profit on 'board day' but I am just concerned that the 'core' rolling system is being parried down so that end_users will have to pay for apps and addendums if they want the "WOW" of a lickety-split Unity 3D system.

One other commercial software OS and a popular third party security program which is free (supposedly) now makes it virtually impossible to operate that program without having to bump into a reminder to "upgrade" and other bells and whistles that decieve one into thinking they are 'updating' when they are actually 'upgrading' to a trial version that will eventually ask for money after 30 days.

Most likely my assumptions are not based on sound documentation but I often wonder why , for example, each version of the Nautilus file manager gets more and more sliced up and archaic and also what was done to Disk Usage Analyzer. That little program was destroyed and makes absolutely no sense (to me at least) in it's present state.

Testing kernel rcs does help keep me sane. I am thankful for that .. but .. frankly ... my thoughts are .. that with the new cadence testing .. the thrill is gone Gone will be the Ubuntu black-space, the lines of indecipherable code and broken systems. It will be a desert out there and good bugs will be hard to find. Dog food will be an item of the past and overheated nVidia cards will be all but a ghost and a whisper.. perhaps leading to be one Unified Turing machine ... lol ...

Re: Confused about cadence testing cycles

@ventrical

Gone will be the Ubuntu black-space, the lines of indecipherable code and broken systems. It will be a desert out there and good bugs will be hard to find. Dog food will be an item of the past and overheated nVidia cards will be all but a ghost and a whisper.. perhaps leading to be one Unified Turing machine

I don't believe a word of it! Humans will always mess up. And so will the machines/software they make.

I do think that may be we should move further up steam in testing. I have tried to investigate testing things like Gnome, KDE and stuff like that. The problem I come up against is that those people only think of testing in terms of bug triaging and developing the software. And there is always this insistence in joining the team.

Regards.

It is a machine. It is more stupid than we are. It will not stop us from doing stupid things.Ubuntu user #33,200. Linux user #530,530

Re: Confused about cadence testing cycles

Code:

* elfy still doesn't understand all that cadence stuff
<balloons> :-( I'm sorry elfy
<elfy> good job I'll be testing xubuntu
<elfy> :)
<balloons> Well, what are you still missing?
<elfy> oh d'oh just realised I'll be doing arm as well ... lol
* cwayne (~cwayne@pool-98-118-37-160.bstnma.fios.verizon.net) has joined #ubuntu-quality
<elfy> balloons: I suspect what I am missing is the more normal term people would use :)
<balloons> elfy, sure sure
<balloons> basically we're going to have test-a-thons if you will every couple weeks
<balloons> each time we'll pick somethng else to focus on
<balloons> we'll pull the tests from the tracker and make a milestone for them and have people report on them
<elfy> ok - that makes sense :)
<balloons> so for next week I've got to pull the tests and make the milestone and announce i
<elfy> we'll not be doing that
<balloons> it's that simple
<balloons> everyone will have saturday - saturday to test and report
<elfy> well kind of we will - when we have something we need specifically testing then we'll be shouting
<elfy> right - and then the 'other' week is not cadence testing, just normal dailies I assume
* elfy likes the idea of that with arm
<elfy> ty balloons :)
<balloons> the other week is an off week
<balloons> I'll be doing things like maintaining and updating tests, playing with bugs, etc, etc
<elfy> but dailies will be updated daily still?
<balloons> writing new tests
<balloons> yes dailies will update, and no one is stopping your from running them if you wish :-)
<elfy> okey doke
<balloons> our focus is just much wider than the iso's now
<elfy> yea - as it perhaps should be
<balloons> <3
* alourie_lunch has quit (Remote host closed the connection)
<elfy> so it in effect gives people longer than a day to test - have the whole of a week to do so in
<elfy> is that correct?
<balloons> yes, exactly
<balloons> flexibility
<balloons> we're spread out and it's so much easier for you to plan to help out at some point in 7 days, rather than 7 hours
<elfy> k - I will post that on the forum, bit of confusion I think
* balloons hasn't been to the forum
<balloons> I've been a bit busy
<balloons> but I wanted to hop over there today
<elfy> balloons: has missed this then Confused about cadence testing cycles
<balloons> gotcha..
<balloons> well let's try and clear everything up then
<balloons> I think it should be really understandable after our first (I hope)
<elfy> I'll just post this over there :)

I was a bit confused too - hope this helps a bit, bear in mind when I'm talking of we I mean Xubuntu

If so are all iso/upgrade testers expected to test every day of that cycle?

As far as I can see - it means you have a week to test in rather than a day.

Re: Confused about cadence testing cycles

Originally Posted by grahammechanical

@ventrical

I don't believe a word of it! Humans will always mess up. And so will the machines/software they make.

I do think that may be we should move further up steam in testing. I have tried to investigate testing things like Gnome, KDE and stuff like that. The problem I come up against is that those people only think of testing in terms of bug triaging and developing the software. And there is always this insistence in joining the team.

Regards.

Yes... I see... there is the control set of tests and then we have here; (ubuntu-forums). Here we are free to experiment and hack to our hearts content. With cadence testing the bit will be in the mouth (said with tounge in cheek) <no pun intended>

I understand the demarcation line. It is a very definitive line, not imaginary. It all makes sense now.